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How to swap out all drives, convert raid 1+0 to raid 4

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(@loonsailor)
Posts: 1
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I'm getting ready to replace all my 2TB HDD's in my Thunderbay 4 with 1TB SSDs.  I want to do it because (1) the HDD noise is driving me nuts and (2) the existing HDDs have 33K hours on them, so they will likely start having trouble soon anyway.  I'd appreciate a sanity check.

The drive contains many, many photos that I edit often with Lightroom, lots of music that I record and edit with Cubase, and some video that I edit occasionally with DaVinci.

My plan is as follows:

  1. Clone (or copy?) to a separate USB HDD.
  2. Replace the 2TB HDDs with 1TB SDDs, probably OWC Mercury Elite
  3. Use SoftRaid to create a new RAID 4 volume with the same name as my old RAID 1+0 volume.  This will give me 3TB instead of 4, but that is enough for me.
  4. Clone (or copy) back to the new volume.

I think that should make the change "invisible" to all my apps that expect to find stuff on the existing volume.  I'm planning to go to Raid 4 because I'd rather not pay for expensive 2TB SSDs, and I need more than the 2TB that 1+0 would give me.  It should be plenty fast, and hopefully reliable enough.  

Given that the drive is data only - no boot records or anything like that - should I clone or copy?  I see that owc recommends cloning with Carbon Copy, which I don't own, but I do own ChronoSync.  Any reason not to use that?

Does this all make sense?  What am I missing?  

Thanks for any help with this!

 
Posted : 19/03/2021 3:05 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8005
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Yes, at 33,000 hours, it is wise to think about replacing disks At 25,000, failure rates increase quite significantly.

Your plan is good except for one thing. The volume Finder "name" is not the same as the VolumeID, which will be different. macOS uses the volumeID, not Finder name for references.

Perhaps ask Chronosync if they have a tool to restore the VolumeID onto the new volume? (You have to be careful never to have two volumes with the same VolumeID connected, however.)

(I am not sure if CarbonCopy Cloner does or not)

Otherwise you will need to repoint everything.

 
Posted : 19/03/2021 3:41 pm
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